Market Manipulation Or No?

-Siddhant Taware

In January Elon Musk changed his Twitter bio to #bitcoin and its prices increased by 20% within hours after that. In the same month, he also tweeted about dogecoin and its prices quadrupled within hours.

In April quarter Tesla bought bitcoin worth $1.5bn and sold 10% of it which had a positive impact on the results of Tesla's April quarter. Recently Musk appeared on a talk show called Saturday Night Live as a guest, before that a lot of hype was created around DogeCoin and its prices shot up but then later on the show he said DogeCoin is a "hustle" which resulted in a drastic drop in price.

Later on, Musk said Tesla won't be accepting bitcoin as payment as BitCoin mining causes a lot of pollution in the form of carbon footprint and since Tesla is based on vehicles running on renewable energy and it would contradict their business.

This led to falling in the price of BitCoin.

This clearly looks like market manipulation doesn't it? Why aren't any actions being taken against Mr. Musk for the same?

At first, I thought maybe it is because there is no regulator for the crypto market but then I found out that Crypto in the US comes under the BSA Act since 2015.

In India currently, the crypto exchanges are demanding that either SEBI governs the crypto market or a new organization is formed for the same. They don't want RBI to govern the crypto market stating the reason that crypto resembles more of a commodity than a currency!!!